2. Beautiful but Deadly Wasn’t that the Theme of This Awful Place?
2. BEAUTIFUL BUT DEADLY; WASN’T THAT THE THEME OF THIS AWFUL PLACE?
ELOWYN
“We’re gonna have to leave soon. Ya know that, dontcha, lassie?” Roan asked me a day later. He sat beside me on a rock of his own, a brook trickling melodically beyond our boots.
When I continued to stare into the water, he brought his elbows to his knees and leaned closer. Eventually, I tore my gaze away and met his expectant stare. His eyes were such a piercing green, made all the brighter by the contrast with his thick dark brows and overgrown beard.
“Ya know we can’t keep waitin’.”
I sighed and looked back to the water. The forest was dense around us, an idyllic picture. As peaceful as it appeared, it was an illusion. The queen could get to us here. She could, apparently, get to us anywhere in the whole, wide, cursed Mirror World.
I bent to pick up a palm-sized pebble, worn smooth by time. I ran a thumb along it. “Yeah. I know. ”
“If she found ya before, she’ll find ya again.”
She , of course, was the queen, always the damn queen. The woman who governed nearly all our actions and yet none of us liked to name.
“And now she’s got Azariah with ‘er,” Roan persisted, “there’s no telling how fast she’ll get ‘im to find ya.”
I smiled grimly, though none of this was news.
“Never seen the pegicorn look so broken,” Roan continued before he, too, turned his gaze to the flowing water. “Never imagined I’d see the day when such a creature would bow to the likes o’ her.” His voice was hard and bitter.
“I’m sure he didn’t want to.” As dominated as Azariah had been, the worst of it was the sadness that had welled in his big, dark eyes. Such a majestic and magical creature…
“Aye, I know he didn’t. But that makes it even more dangerous.”
I waited for him to continue.
“That means Az’s got no fight left in ‘im. He’ll do whatever she asks of him. And he—all pegicorns, really, but ’specially him—is more powerful than maybe even she knows. He’s probably been dragging his hooves so as not to locate ya too fast-like. But if he wants, his magic can home in on yours faster than a dragon can flick its tail.”
“Meaning we should have left already,” I said with a rolling grumble deep in my chest.
Roan kicked out his squat legs in front of him. The water licked at the soles of his boots. “Aye, lassie,” he said with his own roll of lament. “We shoulda left already.”
Truly, though, we couldn’t have. Not really, or at least, not easily.
West hadn’t left Ramana’s bedside for all of yesterday, and then he’d wedged himself alongside her on the narrow, musty mattress and slept the night with his arms clamped around her thin frame as if he feared she’d disappear if he released her for even a moment. I hadn’t seen him step away to so much as pee since he’d laid eyes on her.
Just witnessing West’s relief etched across his face so starkly that it resembled pain sent a wave of desperation crashing through me. When would I next see Rush? How would I find him when he was likely at the palace, the center of the queen’s power and dominion? And how would he and I both survive her until we found our way back to each other?
I all too readily understood why West’s relief was akin to pain. He’d come to terms with Ramana’s death. Rush had told me it had broken him. But now that he had her back, West was terrified he’d lose her again, that finding her alive by mere happenstance was too good to be true, that she’d crumble to dust in his arms and reveal she’d been a cruel illusion all along.
Ramana, who was also Rush’s sister, hadn’t yet opened her eyes. Neither had the four other fae in the room with her, all equally frail, all unable to respond to our prompts. They looked dead but for the steady rise and fall of their emaciated chests.
“Everyone’s almost ready for the meeting,” Xeno announced from behind us.
I turned to smile at him. My smiles were exhausted and strained, but he deserved them, so I tried anyway. “Thanks, X.”
Saffron wasn’t with him, which meant the dragonling had to be with Pru or Hiroshi. Since he would stay with any of the three of them so long as I wasn’t within view, they took turns to give me occasional breaks from his constant attentions. Saffron’s attachment issues had only grown more extreme since I’d had to leave him for the Nuptialis Probatio.
“Have any of them woken up?” I asked Xeno even though Roan and I hadn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes.
None of us entertained the idea that the five “sleeping” fae we’d discovered wouldn’t wake up, although surely it was a distinct possibility. Who knew what the horrid queen had done to them?
Xeno rubbed a hand across his neck. As soon as he’d seen that we were in no immediate danger, he’d bathed in the brook. His hair was several shades lighter now that it was clean.
“Nope,” he said. “Same as before. But Hiro and Ry got West off Ramana’s bed, so that’s progress.”
There hadn’t yet been the opportunity for all the updates the lot of us needed to exchange. In addition to apparently being able to command arbosauruses, Roan could also hover the bodies of the fae as the healers in the Gladius Probatio had, so the sleeping fae could travel with us.
“I’m coming, then,” Roan said, tilting his face to the sky. The sun was behind the trees but close to breaching their tops, signaling it was mid to late morning. “Time to get a move-on.”
“Definitely,” Xeno said, his gaze heating my skin. Since we’d been reunited, his attention was scarcely pointed elsewhere.
When Roan stood, so did I. The dwarf stalked off toward the building we’d landed in, which had turned out to be a two-room dilapidated cottage with a bathroom and kitchen that both appeared largely unused. The bedridden fae were in some kind of trance that denied the usual needs of their bodies.
As Xeno and I watched Roan vanish behind a copse of trees with low branches and wide leaves, I placed a hand on his shoulder and asked, “How are you doing?” It was the first moment of privacy we’d had.
Careful not to dislodge my hand, he faced me. His broad, muscled chest inflated with a big inhale while he studied me. Eventually, he answered, “So much better now that I’m with you.” His eyes shone.
I swallowed and parted my lips to say … something, but he spoke first.
“I thought…” He shook his head. “I worried you might be dead, Wyn.” His words were soft though his sentiment was not. “You were there one second, gone the next. Like, no warning at all. Poof, just gone. I had no fucking idea where you’d gone or what happened to you.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
His shoulder tensed beneath my touch. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. It’s that woman. That cunt. That fucking?—”
“I know it is. But I’m still sorry you had to go through that. I wish there’d been some way to get word to you that I was okay.”
He snorted. “You weren’t okay. You were very far from fucking okay. The queen was trying to kill you the entire time.”
And she’d nearly succeeded, too.
“Fair enough.” I let my hand fall, and Xeno shifted toward me ever so slightly, as if already yearning for my touch. I pretended not to notice. “I just know if roles had been reversed, I would’ve been totally freaked out.”
“I was totally freaked out.”
“I know,” I repeated. “As it was, I feared you might not’ve survived the Sorumbra.”
He rubbed his neck again, dipped his gaze to the ground. “There were some close calls. A few times I wasn’t sure we would make it out of there. And that was with Pru zooming us ahead as often as she could.”
I’d been starting toward our friends, but at that I stopped and turned back to face him. My eyebrows were arched. “She did?”
He nodded.
“Wow. I didn’t expect that. She told me the goblins aren’t allowed to do any kind of magic that hasn’t been preapproved.” By Her Dark Majesty, of course.
He shrugged. “She didn’t seem too bothered by that. She was worried about you too.”
“But enough to reveal goblin secrets?” I shook my head in dismay. “Just … that’s awesome of her.” Beyond a brief hug, I hadn’t had a chance to speak with Pru either. After verifying we were all well enough, a bone-deep weariness had quickly sunk its claws into the lot of us.
“Yep. We wouldn’t be here without her. Well, I guess we probably would be, but not as fast. The dragon was homed in on you. He barely let us stop for quick breaks. It was like he could feel you.”
I already knew the black dragon had been the one to find me. It was one of the first questions I’d asked.
“Never seen anything like it,” Xeno added. “Never heard of anything like it either, and you know how the protectors in Nightguard like to talk.”
“Yeah, almost as much as they like to fuck, and just as noisily.”
Xeno chuckled, sounding much more like the friend with whom I’d grown up. “Ain’t that the truth? They’re horny, little fucking gossips, the whole bunch of them.”
“Especially if they insist they aren’t.”
His eyes crinkled as he grinned at me. “Especially then.”
“Do you miss them? Nightguard, I mean?”
“Sometimes. But I missed you more. ”
I took his arm and resumed walking toward the others. Roan was right: the sooner we moved on, the better.
“You know I won’t be going anywhere till I’m sure you’re safe, right?” he asked.
A part of me wanted to object, but a greater part of me understood it wouldn’t matter if I did, and that I’d do the same for him. “That means you stay till she’s dead.”
“Dead as a dragon’s fucking dinner.”
“Crispy charred.”
“Hell yeah.”
We walked in companionable silence until we cleared the trees and the rundown cottage came into view at the end of the long, winding dirt trail. Such a contrast to the excessive opulence of the queen’s court.
“Really, everyone was worried about you,” Xeno eventually said. “Even Finn.”
I gulped, before asking, “How’d he die?”
It was one of many questions I’d been meaning to ask but had been too raw to hear its answer. It was much easier to focus on the wins, like finding Ramana. We’d had too few wins and far too many losses.
Xeno sighed. “It was stupid, the way he went.”
Knowing that made Finnian’s death somehow worse. He and I had never become true friends, but we’d been well on our way. He was the first fae to be kind to me, the one to treat my wounds when Dougal ordered me shot through with arrows for escaping.
“Or maybe not exactly stupid,” Xeno went on, “but certainly avoidable. On our way to you, we were attacked by more umbracs and all sorts of other awful creatures with too sharp claws and teeth, all poisonous of course.”
I frowned. “Of course.”
“Finn fought ‘em all off bravely and helped us all heal from our injuries along the way. He was really good at the healing stuff.”
I considered asking Xeno if his wings had recovered from the brutal shredding they’d received in the first umbrac attack. When I’d last seen them, they’d been a tattered shadow of their former magnificence. I didn’t know if anyone, dragon shifter or not, could recover from that level of damage. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet.
Scant feet from the trail, we passed a squat tree dotted with a riot of so many shockingly blue blossoms that I drew Xeno to a stop to admire them. Peril was constant; flowers this magnificent were not. The petals were a midnight blue around the edges that faded into a sunny sky-blue center. Their perfume was sweet and crisp and?—
“Owwww!” I yelped and jerked backward straight into Xeno. A flower was attached to my face, digging in. I hissed as it clawed at my nose and cheeks, hooking what felt like barbed suckers into my flesh. My vision blurred as I tried to focus on what part, exactly, of the flower was attacking.
I tugged it off my face with a hard yank that, judging by the sting, took little bits of flesh with it, just as Xeno sliced the vicious bloom from its stalk. I held it gingerly by its stem, far from my face while I caught my breath.
“Fuck,” I accused in the tree’s general direction, taking several steps away from it for good measure. “What the sunshine! Is there nothing in this awful Mirror World that doesn’t want to kill me?”
Xeno kept his dagger out, but sidled beside me to study the monstrous fucking thing.
Three tentacles, which resembled those of the umbracs save for their orange hue, wriggled back and forth from the center of the flower. Their tips opened and closed to reveal tiny, viciously sharp teeth.
“Every fucking thing around here has teeth,” I spat as blood trickled along my cheeks and nose.
“Tell me about it,” said Xeno. “You’re bleeding.”
“I know,” I growled, glowering at the flower. Beautiful but deadly. Wasn’t that the theme of this awful place?
The tentacles bunched together. When I thought they were tucking themselves back away into the flower’s center—because they sure as shit hadn’t been on display when I’d leaned in to sniff its fragrance—they lurched in a sudden stretch toward my face.
I dropped the bloom and ground it with my boot until the tentacles were pulp, growling at the flower’s remains before stomping back onto the trail. “Come on, X. Let’s head back so we can get the hell out of here.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice. Who would’ve guessed time in Nightguard would seem like a vacation after this?”
“Does that mean you’re going back there?” I asked as I dabbed at my face with my sleeve. “I mean, once this is all over? It is still home, right?”
He studied me while we walked. We were close to the cabin when he finally said, “I’ll be wherever you are.”
Unsure how exactly to feel about his devotion, I contained a sigh and blurted, “Did your wings fully heal?”
No answer.
“Can you fly?”
“Yeah, I can fly.” But he didn’t sound happy about it. His footfalls were harder when he added, “Finn did his best.”
“I’m sure he did,” I offered gently. It was obvious Xeno and Finnian had become close in their time in the Sorumbra. “How did he die, then?”
Xeno’s jaw clenched as he trained his stare straight ahead. “Dunno exactly. He died in his sleep while I was on watch.”
“Oh no. Oh, X, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
“Again, not your fault. If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine.”
“It most certainly is not yours. What happened?”
“We don’t know. A bite, maybe? Some kind of poison? Reed looked him over from head to toe and didn’t find a mark. But guys don’t just up and die, not ones like Finn.”
I wove my arm through Xeno’s and squeezed. “I’m sure there was nothing any of you could’ve done.”
Xeno’s jaw remained hard. “We had to leave ‘im. The dragon wouldn’t wait any longer, not even for a fast burial. We left his body in the Wilds for the monsters to eat.”
The image of monsters rending Finn’s flesh and feasting on his bones assaulted me. Weakly, I asked, “Well, what else were you supposed to do?”
Neither one of us had an answer for that or enough of anything else, so we picked up our pace, until Reed ran out the door of the hovel, spotted us, and bolted up the trail toward us. Without even asking what was the matter—because something was always the matter—we sprinted to meet him.